Below are some newbie notes and tips to go along with the postnuke “getting started guide.” The getting started guide is included with the installation files. (html\pnguide) The guide is good and covers most everything. But there were a couple of places where I could’ve used some clarifications. Below are those places…

DOWNLOAD – This isn’t part of the installation guide, but I thought I would mention it. If you want to install postnuke, it’s hard to find what exactly it is you need to download on the PostNuke web site. I eventually found the link from a moderator’s sig in the forum. Here it is:http://developers.postnuke.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewsdownload&sid=2
There’s a link on the home page to download it, but it gives you a lot of choices. Kind of confusing. Also, download the “Zip” package (Postnuke Phoenix). Tar Gzip package is for installing on your won *nix web server. Since this is DH, we’re obviously not doing that.

UPLOAD – Once you unzip the install files, do not just copy the unzipped folder to your root directory on DH. Instead copy files from HTML and SQL directories to the root. That way, when it installs, the “index.php” file is in the root. (ie, when you go to yourdomain.com, the pn home page will come up.)

MySQL and PHP on DH – PN requires both. PHP is ready to go on DH, so nothing to do there! To set up the MySQL database, go into goodies on the web panel and follow the directions. Very easy to do. Once that’s done, create the user and host. Creating a user is easy enough. So is the host, though it gave me a bit of trouble. Long story short, the variable in your host name is the part before your domain name (yourhost.yourdomain.com). yourhost can be whatever you want it to be, for as many MySQL databases as you want to make, but yourdomain must stay the same each time. Once all that is done, it takes about an hour for DH to get your database ready to access. You’ll know it’s ready when you click on in it in the web panel and it takes you to the PhpMyAdmin interface. If it’s not ready, you’ll get an error. Now you’re ready to install.

INSTALL – Need to give “config.php” and “config-old.php” read AND write permissions. I did so by using IE 6.0 for FTP (go to ftp://www.yourdomain.com). I found the files, right-clicked on them, and selected properties. I then checked the “write” boxes for owner, group and all users. The instructions that come with postnuke do not describe how to do it this way. They suggest another method, which confused me.

That does it. Again, these are not meant to be complete instructions on how to install postnuke. These are just my annotations to the installation guide. I hope they help another newbie like myself…